delicately organized minds. Listening, I remembered with an
unaccountable feeling of sadness, that poor Campana had recently died in
London; and almost at the same moment there came to me a remembrance of
my beloved mother, whose early death was my first great grief in
boyhood. All the songs I had ever heard her sing came back to me,
ringing in my mind with a wonderful joy, but ever ending in a strange,
funereal sadness. And not only my mother, but many a dear one besides
returned "in beauty from the dust" appeared to be present--white-haired
old men who had spoken treasured words to me in bygone years;
schoolfellows and other boyish friends and companions; and men, too, in
the prime of life, of whose premature death in this or that far-off
region of the world-wide English empire I had heard from time to time.
They came back to me, until the whole room seemed filled with a pale,
shadowy procession, moving past me to the sound of that mysterious
melody. Through all the evening it came back, in a hundred bewildering
disguises, filling me with a melancholy infinitely precious, which was
yet almost more than my heart could bear. Again and yet again that
despairing _Ah-i-me_ fell like a long shuddering sob from the
revolving globes, and from voices far and near, to be taken up and borne
yet further away by far-off, dying sounds, yet again responded to by
nearer, clearer voices, in tones which seemed wrung "from the depths of
some divine despair"; then to pass away, but not wholly pass, for all
the hidden cells were stirred, and the vibrating air, like mysterious,
invisible hands, swept the suspended strings, until the exquisite bliss
and pain of it made me tremble and shed tears, as I sat there in the
dark, wondering, as men will wonder at such moments, what this tempest
of the soul which music wakes in us can mean: whether it is merely a
growth of this our earth-life, or a something added, a divine hunger of
the heart which is part of our immortality.